Time for the annual Jackson Hole picnic for the gang running our ZIRP banking system. Thanks to the internet, people are talking about the Federal Reserve a lot more than previous years. The GOP candidates have chosen to attack the Fed while not offering anything remotely useful as alternative systems, this is all just the usual hot air causing global warming (joke). Meanwhile, the wind two days ago took down the last of my giant oak tree which I use as a metaphor for our empire. It is finally kaput. Dead. The picture above doesn’t show the scale of this collapse: the tree trunk on the ground is over a story high!

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Gov. Perry of Texas has given the elites quite a fright recently with his ‘gun him down’ talk aimed at Bernanke who is trying to save all the buddies and campaign contributors to this clown. Of course, Perry is being totally cynical just like his denouncing of Darwin is pure bunk. He knows perfectly well, how geology and evolution works. He runs an oil state that is all about the history of life on earth! He panders to ignorant people because it is easy to do and he and his drinking buddies laugh about it behind closed doors just as he laughs with them about attacking his good buddy, Bernanke.

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Nonetheless, the call for arresting and putting in prison like Wikileaks soldiers scared Bernanke sufficiently that the media giants had to push Perry a tad to get him to stop doing this so much: Jackson Hole Bankers Reflect on QE2 – Bloomberg

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“If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what you would do with him,” Perry said in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “We would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous — or treasonous — in my opinion.”

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The key words here are ‘between now and the election.’ When Fed chiefs printed money like mad monkeys in the past when Reagan or the Bushes occupied the White House, Perry was perfectly happy. It is printing money when a Democrat is there that is ‘treason’. Treason to the class Perry represents, after all. Bernanke is supposed to drive a stake into the economy and thus, install a free-spending right wing Republican in the White House.

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Bernanke will be making “a major speech and the chairman knows the whole world is watching, so if he chooses not to say very much, the markets and the economy in some broader sense would be disappointed,” said Soss, a former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “It’s absolutely critical that the Federal Reserve portray itself as having some relevance to the economic problems the society faces.”..

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…Bernanke told Congress on July 13 the Fed does have stimulus options; these include buying additional securities, increasing the average maturity of its bond portfolio, lowering the interest rate on excess reserves and pledging to keep its balance sheet near a record high for a longer period of time.

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He also foreshadowed the Federal Open Market Committee’s Aug. 9 decision to hold interest rates near record lows.

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ZIRP is here forever just as it sits on top of Japan. Japan explored the concept of running perpetual government debts coupled with zero interest loans from the central bank and it runs OK there except it is destroying the country. Most Americans are not aware of this. The whole point is to not tax export/imports but instead, keep things running along in the red forever so the voters don’t know they are bankrupting the nation until it is too late.

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We know that Japan is running epic debts compared to the population/economy and has been in a depression for quite a few years and it only gets worse and worse. So, copying this is pure insanity. But we are copying it! Right along, everything except for one item: we are doing bankrupt due to trade, too, at the same time.

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Perry and his buddies on the right have a solution to this: nothing. Yes, nothing. The Democratic solution to the trade deficit is…more free trade, too. Indeed, so is Ron Paul and his crazy crew. There is NO political party or candidate calling for tariffs and barriers to protect our nation.

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Bernanke and his buddies all want to monetize our way out of 40 years of trade deficits. Obama and his bomb crew believes if we attack and invade more oil pumping Arab nations, we will eventually balance our trade somehow (the looting solution!). So far, winning wars is cheap compared to the cost of holding these destroyed places. Far from surrendering, our entry into Arab countries guarantees endless fighting of the most ferocious sort.

In what looked like a covert lobbying effort, a top Bank of America official brushed past Gov. Rick Perry (R) during a New Hampshire business breakfast on Wednesday, shook his hand and uttered the words, “Bank of America, we will help you out,” before walking away as if nothing had been said.

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The brief exchange was caught by a CSPAN camera, but went unnoticed until the blog ZeroHedge pointed it out. ZeroHedge also correctly placed the man’s identity as James Mahoney, Bank of America’s director of public policy.

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What is funny is how Perry doesn’t bat an eye nor does the briber pause but quickly walks away. Perry will pick up the loot later via a staff member just like he picks up his AIPAC loot or gets money from the oil corporations. His pretense of being ‘a good ol’ boy’ who is working for the working stiffs is all a put-on just like the Bush Skull and Bones elites worked hard at pretending to be cowboys. Not to mention the fake Reagan cowhand. Moo. Things I really resent since I really did handle cows and horses and used an ox team, even!

Biden said a rising China will “fuel economic growth and prosperity,” and will mean “more demands for American-made goods and services and more jobs back home in the United States.”

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It will also bring a new partner “with whom we can meet global challenges together,” he added.

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“It’s in our self interest that China continues to prosper,” he said.

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HAHAHA…I will die laughing. This is the fix: we go to China and in turn, will be hired by them to do what? Build them Boeing jets? This is seemingly the only thing we can sell them that isn’t a commodity product like minerals, oil or food. Will we sell them weapons? Might as well. No jobs will come back from China. China has zero intention of letting this happen. Unlike our craven politicians so easily bribed, the Chinese officials actually want power, not be someone’s patsy.

So Italians are asking, why did only 11 out of 315 senators show up to discuss the measure on Wednesday evening? And why do just 0.016 percent of the proposed budget cuts apply to the political class itself?..

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…This attitude is symbolic of a privileged political class that has lost touch with its electorate and spends most of its time enjoying the benefit of being an Italian politician, without acting like one.

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The numbers speak for themselves: At $20,000 per month, Italian members of parliament are the highest paid in Europe.

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They earn twice as much as German politicians, to choose just one nearby country.

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Our own Congress should resign. They no longer declare war. They don’t do budgets, either. They are now officially superfluous. The Gang of Six can join other nefarious gangs like the former Chinese Gang of Four which were imprisoned or executed after being overthrown. Our expensive Congress exists only to fool people into thinking we have ‘elections’ and not pre-selected situations where floating fiat currency free trade warmongers vie with each other to see who is the best buddy of Netanyahu and all those offshore bankers and foreign manufacturers.

More than half of 105 leading Japanese companies surveyed are looking to locate more factories and offices overseas to counteract the strong yen, falling share prices and power supply shortages, according to a Kyodo News poll.

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The survey found 55 of the 105 said they would consider stepping up overseas expansion when asked what actions they may take to cope with these increasingly harsh economic conditions.

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Back to Bernanke: finally the news has come out, thanks to the auditing of the Fed, that Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Loans from Fed – Bloomberg. The Freedom of Information Act was invoked against the Fed and this is why we know that JP Morgan, Bank of America and all the other five holders of 90% of all banking derivatives were bailed out so they could pretend they were solvent and not full of rot.

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So, we continue to have this totally fake banking system funded by the Fed that makes money out of thin air and these bankers fixed their loan messes by dumping $1.2 trillion in COMMODITIES such as gold, oil, etc. Which is why we have raging inflation and the dollar is falling and this isn’t fixing our trade deficit much since we import oil and manufactured goods! Instead, we get inflation here with ZIRP bank lending for the very rich who love this since they borrow money to play in the world commodity markets which is why, when stocks fell across the planet, gold shot up.

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That is, they put this free loan money into gold. They will remove it when they think they can make money elsewhere which is why we are still seeing bubbles broiling everywhere we look. One pops but thanks to the Fed’s generous lending schemes, immediately, another one forms! This won’t stop since the Fed is committed to keeping the top bankers alive no matter what. When they really do deserve to die.

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This is a ZIRP Zombie Economy. The walking dead heading towards some nuclear meltdown. And the EU is dead thanks to over expanding when Russia fell. The confederation grew too much, too fast and took on a lot of deadbeat economies. The same millstones that sank the Soviets is now drowning Germany. A bad thing, the Germans can become quite nasty if pushed too hard.

7 responses to “ZIRP Zombie Economies”

The tree has been rotting from the inside for decades, as has our nation. It only looked strong and unified on the outside. And as our states counter bankruptcy by cutting off more and more services, these limbs will weaken and drop.
I hear that my local school district will be teaching Automobile Detailing soon. Imagine that! Teaching kids the useful and important trade of cleaning puke, blood and semen off the back seat of a rich dude’s car. When I was in school, we learned that the ancients were so ignorant, that they thought the earth was flat. Thinking about that, one realizes that disproving that the earth is flat is about the easiest experiment that one can do. So were the ancients really that ignorant, or was it government decree that the earth was flat? They don’t teach the latter interpretation in school, because it clashes with the shiny back seat version that schools are paid to promote.
Hope things are going better for you. 2011 has been a very fucked up year.

This won’t stop since the Fed is committed to keeping the top bankers alive no matter what. When they really do deserve to die.

Yes – they really do.
On a utilitarian basis, if the boards of all TBTF banks were wiped out, it would instantly introduce strong incentives into that industry not to loot taxpayer money. It would be of far greater humanitarian benefit than drone bombing beardies in caves

The Lovely Sheryle Bagwell (the Business editor of Morning Program) of Radio National channel of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation wanted know why the bankers meet at Jackson Hole. (This has vanished from the podcast record.) This woman is always good for belly laugh especially when after I have been reading EMS and ZH.

What happens when the world’s “economies” really do finally crash and burn resulting in chaos, even more wars, and the unraveling and disarray of private and government systems of maintenance and control of infrastructures. All of the more than 400 various nuclear power plants need constant, exquisite maintenance and controls to keep the huge amounts of “hot” fuel cool. Not even “worse case scenario” events unfolding in overlapping waves of impending chaos, and many, many will fail and melt down and through, it would almost seem certain! Considering this most likely unfolding of events, the doom of massive radiation poisoning on such an epic scale seems unavoidable! Sigh…

I kissed my wonderful son goodbye yesterday and he will be heading back to Tokyo for another year of “teaching English”. We’re very sad about this. All of our persuasions to no avail. His darling is from Tokyo, and she and her family live and work there. I told him to bring her back here and find another job. He doesn’t want any “gaps” in his career track. He also loves the place, and loves the people there… he has commitment to his students. He says he’ll be looking for a job back here and he only thinks he’ll stay one more year, and that she would probably come back with him then. We hope for the best, but we worry.